Shannen Doherty, Actress on ‘Beverly Hills, 90210’ and ‘Charmed,’ Dies at 53

Shannen Doherty, who starred on Beverly Hills, 90210 and Charmed before exiting both Aaron Spelling-produced shows amid conflicts with co-workers, has lost her long battle with cancer. She was 53.

Doherty died Saturday. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2015; after treatment and several surgeries, she announced in April 2017 that she was in remission. In February 2020, she tearfully revealed on Good Morning America, “I’m stage 4 — my cancer came back,” then said in June 2023 that cancer had spread to her brain.

“I definitely have days where I say, ‘Why me?’ And then I go, ‘Well, why not me? Who else? Who else besides me deserves this?’ None of us do,” she said.

“It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty. On Saturday, July 13, she lost her battle with cancer after many years of fighting the disease,” publicist Leslie Sloane said in a statement to People. “The devoted daughter, sister, aunt and friend was surrounded by her loved ones as well as her dog, Bowie. The family asks for their privacy at this time so they can grieve in peace.”

After holding down regular roles on the NBC shows Little House on the Prairie and Our House and starring in the critically acclaimed Heathers (1988), Doherty in 1990 was hired to play Brenda Walsh on Beverly Hills, 90210, created by Darren Star.

Her character and twin brother, Brandon (Jason Priestley), move with their dad from Minnesota to Southern California, and they try to fit in at West Beverly High.

Doherty, however, was dismissed from the show after the fourth season concluded in May 1994 amid reported clashes with her co-stars and producers. She did not do herself any favors when, halfway through shooting the season finale, she cut her hair, which made continuity on the episode difficult.

“There was definitely a time that I did not want to be there. I was unhappy,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2005. “It sounds odd to say that I was on a hit show making a lot of money and I was unhappy, because it makes me sound unappreciative — I wasn’t.

“It’s just that the sacrifice at the time seemed too large to me. The sacrifice of a camera pointed in my face 24 hours a day while I was desperately trying to grow up, to figure out my spirituality, to figure out my boyfriends. I mean, I was a teenager.”

“She’s a very intelligent young woman who isn’t afraid to speak her mind,” Priestley said.

Doherty starred with Ben Affleck and Jason Lee in Kevin Smith’s Mallrats (1995), then returned to primetime when she was cast as Prue Halliwell, the oldest of three sister witches — Alyssa Milano as Phoebe and Holly Marie Combs as Piper were the others — on The WB series Charmed, created by Constance M. Burge.

Doherty and Milano were said not to get along, and then Prue was killed by a demon assassin in the season-three finale in May 2001. Rose McGowan ostensibly replaced her in the cast.

“Diplomacy wasn’t my forte back then, and I was too vocal about things that really could have been left alone,” Doherty wrote in her 2010 book, Badass: A Hard-Earned Guide to Living Life With Style and (the Right) Attitude. “Who cared if I thought an episode was stupid? Who cared what I thought of the script? It was my job to do my best with what was in front of me.”

90210 went six more seasons without her and Charmed lasted another five while Doherty found herself a focus of the tabloid media. On the cover of People in 1993, she was described as a “hard-partying, check-bouncing bad girl [who] may be going way too far.” 

Shannen Maria Doherty was born on April 12, 1971, in Memphis, Tennessee. Her mother, Rosa, owned a beauty parlor, and her father, Tom, was a financial adviser who was in bad health for years before he died in 2010 at age 66.

Doherty worked on Pepsi commercials when she was 10 and then appeared in 1981 on a two-part episode of the Merlin Olsen-starring Father Murphy, produced by Michael Landon.

Doherty was hired to portray Jenny Wilder — adopted by Laura (Melissa Gilbert) and Almanzo (Dean Butler) after her father dies — on the final season of Little House on the Prairie, also produced by Landon. She also played Jenny in three subsequent telefilms.

In 1985, she was eldest daughter Kathleen Kennedy on the CBS miniseries Robert Kennedy and His Times; appeared with Sarah Jessica Parker and Helen Hunt in Girls Just Want to Have Fun; and guest-starred on yet another Landon show, Highway to Heaven.

On the 1986-88 series Our House, Doherty’s Kris Witherspoon and her two siblings move with their mother (Deidre Hall) from Indiana into their grandfather’s home in California after her dad dies. 

After Charmed, Doherty appeared as herself in Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (2004); starred in several telefilms; and played the illegitimate daughter of a billionaire on the short-lived Fox primetime soap North Shore.

On reality shows, she competed on Dancing With the Stars, hosted Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty and Scare Tactics and starred on Shannen Says, in which she planned her 2011 wedding to photographer Kurt Iswarienko, and Off the Map with Shannen & Holly, where she reteamed with Combs.

Doherty filed for divorce from Iswarienko in April 2023. Earlier, she had brief marriages to professional poker player Rick Salomon and Ashley Hamilton, son of actor George Hamilton.

Regrading her troubles on 90210, Doherty told People in 2019: “Somebody had a problem with me being late, but perhaps they didn’t know I was late because my dad was in the hospital, or maybe because I was in a horrible marriage. I didn’t share, or I wasn’t asked. I’m not saying it was all a misunderstanding, but a large portion of it was a misunderstanding.”

She returned as Brenda for seven first-season episodes of a 2008-13 reboot, and for 2019’s BH90210, she played a version of herself. Doherty forged ahead on the latter after she was told her cancer had returned and former castmate Luke Perry had died at 52.

“One of the reasons, along with Luke, that I did BH90210 and didn’t really tell anybody [that her cancer was back] because I thought, people … with stage 4 can work too,” she said. “Like, you know, our life doesn’t end the minute we get that diagnosis. We still have some living to do.”

Rick Porter contributed to this report.